Re: A..Z alternatives

2004-09-25 Thread Jonadab the Unsightly One
Andrew Rodland [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: What about BASIC? Aren't all the little kids today raised on BASIC? :) I don't know about the kids _today_, but for about twenty years starting circa 1980 most home computers came with exactly one programming language tool, and it was BASIC --

Re: A..Z alternatives

2004-09-23 Thread Matthew Walton
Andrew Rodland wrote: On Tuesday 21 September 2004 07:18 pm, Thomas A. Boyer wrote: Larry Wall wrote: Somebody needs to talk me out of using A..Z for the simple cases. Larry [ for array dimension placeholder ] That might confuse users of languages that were not C-syntax-influenced, who think

A..Z alternatives

2004-09-21 Thread Thomas A. Boyer
Larry Wall wrote: Somebody needs to talk me out of using A..Z for the simple cases. Larry The Turing programming language uses splat to stand in for the length of the array, so in Turing *a[*-1]* means what Perl 5 programmers mean when they say *$a[-1]*. However, splat is already quite

Re: A..Z alternatives

2004-09-21 Thread Andrew Rodland
On Tuesday 21 September 2004 07:18 pm, Thomas A. Boyer wrote: Larry Wall wrote: Somebody needs to talk me out of using A..Z for the simple cases. Larry [ for array dimension placeholder ] That might confuse users of languages that were not C-syntax-influenced, who think that '**' means